As the "temptations" in the title suggest, Mishra disapproves of the western-inspired modernisation currently occurring in these countries, and at the South Bank on June 15 he gave a reading from the book and defended its central argument that India has responded wrongly to "the challenge of how to be modern".

Mishra's accounts of westernisation, some of which originally appeared in Granta and the New York Review of Books, evoke the usual suspects in the debate, from Coca-Cola signs to air conditioning. Behind them lie the more fundamental assumptions that the first generation of freedom fighters brought to India, and which became in Mishra's words "the kind of ideas and assumptions that I grew up with" - that India needed to modernise into an industrial, secular society on the model of the west. For Mishra, this was the direct result of colonialism, and has led to an India which is sacrificing its cultural heritage for the sake of a model it can never hope to recreate.

Yet this interpretation is not without its dissenters, as expressed by the journalist and academic Urvashi Butalia, who asserted that she was in "strong and radical disagreeement" with Mishra's articulation of the problem.

For Butalia, the idea of a simple opposition between "east" and "west", and between "modern" and "traditional" practices, simplifies the debate and suggests that modernisation is a monolithic imposition, rather than a phenomenon with which India has been "negotiating" for thousands of years. She cited the fact that since 1992 more than a million women have gained positions in local and municipal governments in India, an instance of an "engagement with democracy" which Mishra's broadly male- oriented book overlooks.

These two arguments were thrown into rather bleak relief by the third speaker, John Gray, a professor at LSE and the author of the best selling Straw Dogs. For Gray, the whole idea of adopting a moral attitude to the question of modernisation is "complete folly", as the only issue of importance is that of environmental sustainability. "The glaciers don't care" how we modernise, Gray argued, and in the face of the prospect of global warming - which will be felt most acutely in the poorest regions of the world - the only issue worth debating is how poorer nations will manage the inevitable process of industrialisation.

The conflicting approaches of the three speakers expressed the extraordinarily complicated nature of modernisation, encompassing as it must questions of morality, economics and environmental survival. Gray's arguments tend to cut like a knife through socially-oriented answers to such questions, but his eagerness to accuse others of "moral posturing" and his reluctance to offer any kind of solution ("that's not what I'm here to do") contains a cynicism which at times felt indulgent. The debate between Mishra and Butalia made some more useful distinctions, such as the recognition that modernisation isn't a new phenomenon, but also that the current speed of change is unprecedented.

The one point on which all three speakers agreed was that the answer to the "challenge of modernity" will be different for every country. And if, as many economists predict, the most significant economies of the 21st century will be those of India and China, how these countries modernise looks set to become the most important question for us all.